I will look into Point Oven.



The other package is modo.



There are several reasons. One reason is because I would like to deliver these fully animated models to someone in a format that modo can work with. Another reason is there are some experiments I want to conduct in modo with some already animated models.



Yes, you do. It is stated in the first post. I want to bake the animations to the geometry level so that I can export from MAX in order to bring the fully animated model into another application that does not currently support rigged models.

This sort of thing used to be done (via export formats) all the time for games and the like. The character model would be animated via bones or Character Studio and then exported. The exported model would not have any bones any longer, but would contain information that would displace the vertices of the model, thus animating it. All I want to do is BAKE the animation to the GEOMETRY level in order to get an animated model into another package that supports animation, but currently does not have any bones, IK or the like. As stated, this is very much like what we used to do for older game engines that also did not support bones and the like, but used animated models.

I am rather surprised that this is not so easy to do in MAX (or so it seems) as other packages (like XSI) accomplish this quite easily. One of the main reasons for this type of thing is to get animated models to another package that may not utilize the same methodology to accomplish animation. Baking down the animation to the geometry level is also used to simplify what is going on in a scene. For example, if someone is creating a crowd scene animation, then having each model move with bones (etc) can really slow down the system. However, baking the animation to the geometry can free up a lot of resources and speed things up.

In any case, WHY I need this is not important. HOW to do it is. Most packages allow for it. How can it be done in MAX?